2018 was a crazy year for cryptocurrency enthusiasts as markets dropped significantly in value, but there were still plenty of sensational headlines to capture attention in a period when digital currency news coverage changed drastically. According to statistics from Cryptocompare and alternative research from other sources, media crypto narratives have evolved rapidly.

Bitcoin, blockchain, and cryptocurrencies still made headlines in 2018 within the financial technology space. Last year, coverage changed markedly throughout the industry with a bunch of new blogs and individual reporters attempting to cover the space. For instance, the algorithmically ranked data site Detailed ranks 50 cryptocurrency-focused news outlets, with the rankings updated every 24 hours. Detailed utilizes far more advanced web crawling and ranking techniques than can be found from sorting through Alexa traffic and Google Pagerank.

The top five cryptocurrency-focused news publications today according to Detailed.

The web portal Detailed uses software called the 8-bitbot, an extremely detailed web crawler that combs cryptocurrency blog ratings and measures the number of followers. According to the website’s algorithmic rankings, the top five digital asset news outlets comprise Coindesk, Cointelegraph, CCN, the Ethereum Blog, and news.Bitcoin.com. The lower bracket of news outlets had much fewer mentions throughout the last six weeks of link data.

Last year also saw sponsored coverage exposed including promotional ICO posts. Breaker Magazine’s Corin Faife reported in October that more than half of all crypto news publications tested took money to publish undisclosed promotional material. Out of 22 crypto news outlets, 12 said they would publish paid content without disclosing to readers that it was promotional. Two outlets explained they would do it “under certain conditions” and prices for the paid material were quoted between $240 to a high of $4,500 per published request. Faife’s report concludes that many of the news organizations are high traffic websites that rank near the top of Google’s news results. One news publication removed a staff member after Breaker Magazine’s evidence was published.

Surveyed news outlets that were asked to publish sponsored content without disclosure.

Another study published on Jan. 16 by the analytical data website Cryptocompares hows a significant amount of news coverage changes last year. Using the company’s API, the firm collected metadata from 64,605 articles from 25 news sites throughout 2018. One chart shows how the subjects “bitcoin” and “blockchain” dominated the leading categories of news coverage. Other topics such as trading, mining, ICO, sponsored, exchanges and wallets saw much slimmer coverage.

The leading categories of cryptocurrency and blockchain news coverage in 2018.

Cryptocompare Research executive Charlie Humberstone explains in the recent studythat trading and market commentary increased in 2018. “As ever, the volatile cryptocurrency markets were a topic of great interest to readers and garnered a large share of news coverage — Despite falling prices, the number of articles about crypto trading and market commentary actually increased as the year progressed,” Humberstone’s research details.

Altcoin coverage in 2018.

Even though there have been enormous amounts of hype surrounding altcoins and tokens over the last two years, the subject of bitcoin has regained dominance. The author remarks that bitcoin-related articles reached a peak of 42 percent by the end of 2018 but blockchain-related material remained prevalent. Digital currency news will continue to trend in 2019 while the way it is portrayed and reported on will evolve further. The bear market has affected some publications, according to Humberstone’s research, as the number of crypto articles dropped considerably from its peak in May 2018.